Microsoft Teams On Linux, What’s the Story?

Update 22nd October: The UserVoice is now over 5,500 votes and has just moved to “on the backlog”. That means it’s an ask that’s more seriously being considered for being given engineering time. Keep your votes coming if you want a Linux client:

The windows client is actually Electron, Tom Morgan explains the client architecture well here. There was hope from a lot of people that as the web experience on Windows and Mac full-featured, the same would be possible on Linux at a minimum, or that there may be a native Linux client.

There are some unsupported community projects that have attempted to create a native Electron client. Note I have not tried any of these, and they are not supported by Microsoft in any way.

15 comments

I would love to see a native Linux client. The electron apps do nothing for me since they only wrap the web interface with no added support for video, although I appreciate that they exist. How are the Windows/Mac apps supporting video if they are also electron apps?

I did notice last week that audio support is now available in the web client. Still no video, but I was able to join a meeting and participate. If the official Windows/Mac app is electron-based, why is there no Linux client yet? Aren’t they already 95% of the way there?

Meeting join via browser is available in Chrome (Audio) and Edge (AV), so your best bet would be to use Chrome on Linux. Teams is always just a web app wrapped in something, on Windows that’s currently Chrome wrapped in electron.

Lack of Linux support for teams (which really means testing in a Linux browser) , is quite surprising when you think that many developer teams using other platforms like Asana or Slack use Linux. For example while basic functionality works in Chrome, the web app lacks desktop notifications which is really bad as you risk missing your colleague or boss messaging you or posting a resource. In my case I came up with a tapermonkey script hack, but really Microsoft can’t keep up with current trends and still bee always about 5-7 years in delay? If I were in a buying position that would sound an alarm bell…

“Steven Collier – 09/03/2018 Reply Meeting join via browser is available in Chrome (Audio) and Edge (AV), so your best bet would be to use Chrome on Linux. ”

Are you saying you’re able to join a Teams meeting with Audio on Linux? If so, I’m doing something wrong because I just get a popup that that feature isn’t supported yet (with an invitation to download the .EXE client… sigh…)

Teams on Chrome is quite good. The lack of desktop notifications is the biggest drawback. If desktop notifications were implemented our Linux team could join in 90% of the activity. Video and Audio would be good, but as a tech team we have little use for them. Text allows us to interact asynchronously, which is paramount in a hectic environment.

Desktop popups are a common feature for many websites. I have to deny them all the time. But, for Teams I would jump fast to enable them Surely Microsoft could add them relatively easily if they want to enable a full experience in a browser.

Srsly, I’ve never seen a web app THAT platform-dependent as ms teams. It’s nearly 2020, never been easier than before to write web apps which adhere to fucking web standards, but MS still have not learned from their 1990s IE non-standard solo implementations.

To me, Teams in a browser fails because it’s in a browser. I can cope with that if using it only for meetings, where I open it and use it for a bit and then close it again. Given how CPU-hungry some browser-based real-time stuff can be, it’s not something I’d want to leave running. I also constrain what web stuff can do in my browser for security reasons and I’m not relaxing that for Teams if there’s conflict.

This means that it’s not such a good on-line chat client as Slack or Telegram or Skype, which largely behave themselves, unlike web clients. I don’t strictly need it for work, because I have a Windows machine there, but it does mean that I will not be responding to queries from home where I run Linux. At the moment I have Slack and will answer quick questions if I see them during the evening, but that’s not going to work with Teams.